1. Technical Field
The embodiments herein generally relate to communication systems, and, more particularly, to the field of memory architectures in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
A Media forward link only (MediaFLO™) system, available from Qualcomm, Inc., California, USA, is a system of broadcasting data to handheld devices where data transmission is from the transmitter to handheld device. In MediaFLO™ devices transmission is performed in superframes, each superframe containing 1,200 orthogonal frequency division multiplexing OFDM symbols carrying multiple media channels called Multicast Logical Channels (MLC). Each MLC contains a number of Reed-Solomon (RS) error control blocks (ECB).
The MediaFLO™ device receiver's media access control (MAC) de-interleaver random access memory (RAM) uses a RS decoder to decode data in the outer code, a turbo decoder to decode data in the inner code, and a de-interleaver to recover the transmitted data packets to combat burst errors found in signal due to channel noise.
There is a frequent arbitration between the RS decoder and clients' read/write accesses. Many memory architectures make use of multiple-port RAMs to ease the arbitration process which leads to larger RAM area and power consumption. Due to the large amount of MLC data, the RAM size increases and hence the power consumption increases as well. Off-chip implementations where the MAC de-interleaver RAM and RS decoders (demodulator) are implemented separately lead to greater power consumption due to switching of signals between the MAC de-interleaver RAM chip and demodulator chip. Hence, it would be desirable to have on chip implementation of the MAC de-interleaver RAM and RS decoders with reduced power consumption and higher RS decoder throughput.